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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Hesco Bag Home Construction

As you may know I have been working up new concepts for earthbag homes for quite awhile. But lately I have moved beyond the idea of filling and stacking thousands of bags as wasteful, time consuming, and lets face it - pretty damn tiring.

To me the answer seems so obvious and based on such common sense - I don't see how can so many people have missed it completely. Well I'm getting ahead of myself. The concept is this.

Use Hesco bags instead of traditional earth bags for all the exterior walls of your house. This is an amazing concept since a Hesco bag is 3' to 4' thick it would provide all the thermal mass you could ever want. That means no need to buy insulation EVER. If you've ever walked into a cave or a mine shaft on a hot day and discovered how cool it was - then you understand the concept. Additionally you would also have a house stronger than most bunkers (nice benefit). Their are other considerable benefits to this method of construction.

One major benefit is that one person with a front end loader or backhoe could construct an entire 30 foot wall x 9 feet high in one morning. You would use 3ft x 9ft Hesco's stacked together for the exterior wall sections. You would use 2ft x 2ft Hesco bags (cubes) to construct the areas around the windows and doors; using small regular sized earth/sand bags as fill around the windows and doors and the interior walls. When you are all done you simply cover with wire, and trowel (or use a gunnite gun) up 2 inches or so of concrete to encase the wall. After the concrete dries you have a concrete home that looks essentially like any other concrete home. Then you can paint, or use stucco to make your house look like any other un-assuming adobe or stucco home - if that's what your in-to. Personally I could give a shit what other people think of my home. Of course the walls will be considerably thicker than other people's, but that's their problem.

http://www.gizmag.com/hesco-bastion-demolition/20153/picture/145210/

And...if you like the look of thinner walls (like the 1ft thick walls you get with traditional sand bag construction you could use something like this "Sandmaster".

http://barriersystemsllc.com/models.php

This device, when used by two trained people, is reported to be able to fill up to 6,000 bags in 8 hours. A few days like that and you would have all the building materials needed to construct a pretty large and very secure house.

To illustrate this by degrees - here is a sample of traditional earthbag homes.

Also note that for most people who don't mind doing some of their own labor you may expect a reasonable cost for a small home to be finished for maybe $10,000 to $25,000.

Not bad when you consider the modern, "archival type" home that looks like every other POS house in the standard suburb to be sold for upwards of $200,000 to $300,000. Perfect if you want to live in debt the rest of your life.

For us we will find a $20,000 top $30,000 piece of property and build our own home for another $20,000. No mortgage, no debt, no slavery.

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Our Mission

I am not bound to please thee with my answers.William Shakespeare

We have been following this path (active prepping) since the early 1990's. In our case this includes military training, weapons training, hunting, fishing, tracking, advanced martial arts training in open hand CQB and hand weapons, orienteering, outdoors skills, and other less obvious but important skills. Your training and skills should, as much as possible, always be seen as tools that need to be improved. You never know everything and you can always forget what you know.

This site is dedicated not just to survival, but to the people who choose to live, with dignity as sovereign beings. We see too many people who focus entirely too much energy in pleasing themselves with shallow pursuits. Sacrificing their own freedom, and independence.

I believe we can all be sovereign citizens - by living life for ourselves; and not for the sake of others, or a group, or a collective state. Too many people spend too much of their time, money and lives concerned with what others think of them, and trying to gain the esteem of strangers. This is dangerous and not only effects how they spend the bulk of their money and their life's productivity, but even how they vote and how they view governance.

This "lifepath" I just described, which I call "living life for others", (Ayn Rand called it, "second hand living"), impacts the choices many people make about the cars they drive, the houses they own, even the clothes they wear. In its most essential form, it is an unthinking compulsion, or need to impress other people. The cold fact is other people, especially strangers - do not think about, or care at all, what you drive, what you wear, or what sort of house you live in; and even if they did, is it not somewhat insane to live life this way.

This false life path of "living to impress others" or "maintaining appearances" is a central ingredient of collectivist governance, and religious power schemes. It is how organizations like governments and religions control people. This primary tool of control has been used by countless entities: organized religion; and later by governments....i.e., leninism, marxism, socialism, facism whatever you may call it. They and all other collectivist forms of control use a few simple but effective mechanisms to control people; the desire to "belong", and....altruism.

Like Spock in Star Trek - the proponents of collectivism believe "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".

But this is a false and dangerous lie....for who determines what "need" is, and how exactly is the "many" determined?

By this vague but noble sounding principle two people....maybe your neighbors.....should be allowed to get together and "vote" to steal your belongings; your food, maybe your house, maybe your children......or even your life.

Why NOT - don't their needs outweigh yours?

The right answer, of course - is NO. America was, historically, the only form of government EVER founded on the principle that an INDIVIDUAL'S needs are paramount; and that together we all make up a society of individuals and that a proper governments central responsibility is to protect the INDIVIDUAL rights of its citizens.

Collectivism is a corrupt ideology by which people are legally allowed to steal the property, and productivity of an individual, any individual. They are justified by a vague undefined notion of the "needs" of some group or collective. Which can never be satisfied because "NEED" is always great according to someone.

Modern collectivism also has another benefit to its followers - it's phony altruism provides a twisted path to easy nobility. This un-earned nobility is often driven by the need to impress others with your apparent "compassion".

The answer to this is simple - Live life for yourself. Make choices for yourself - based on the way YOU want to live, and the person YOU want to be.

Do not concern yourselves with what others do, and how they choose to live. Learn to be at peace with your choices, and find yourself and true contentment.-----------------------------------------------------------------